Out of the drops which the harmonica had wrung from Rabette's heart the
old enchanter, Fate, is perhaps preparing, as other enchanters do out of
blood, dark forms; for Roquairol had seen it, and wondered at the
sensibility of a heart which hitherto had been set in motion more by
occupations than by romances. Now he drew nearer to her with a new
interest. Since the night of the oath, he had drawn his heart out of all
unworthy fetters. In this freedom of victory, he went forward proudly,
and stretched out his arms more lightly and longingly after noble love.
He now visited his sister incessantly; but he still kept to himself.
Rabette was not fair enough for him, beside his tender sister. She was
an artificial ribbon-rose beside one by Van der Ruysch; she said
herself, naively, that she looked, with her village-complexion in white
lawn, like black-tea in white cups. But in her healthy eyes, not yet
corroded into dimness by tragical drops, and on her fresh lips, life
glowed; her powerful chin and her arched nose threatened and promised
spirit and strength; and her upright and downright heart grasped and
repelled decidedly and intensely. He determined to prove her. The
Talmud[163] forbids to inquire after the price of a thing, when one does
not mean to buy it; but the Roquairols always cheapen and look further.
They tear a soul in two, as children do a bee, in order to eat out of it
the honey which it would gather. They borrow from the eel, not only his
dexterity in slipping away, but also the power to twine around the arm
and crush it.
And now he let all the dazzling powers of his multi-form nature play
before her,--the sense of his ascendency permitted him to move freely
and gracefully, and the careless heart seemed open on all sides,--he
linked so freely earnestness and jest, glow and glitter, the greatest
and the least, and energy with mildness. Unhappy girl! now art thou his;
and he snatches thee from thy _terra firma_ with rapacious wings up into
the air, and then hurls thee down. Like a vine running on a
lightning-rod, thou wilt richly unfold thy powers and bloom up on him;
but he will draw down the lightning upon himself and thy blossoms, and
strip thee of thy leaves and rend thee utterly.
Rabette had never conceived of such a man, much less seen one; he made
his way by main force into her sound heart, and a new world went in
after him. Through Liana's love for the Captain, hers mounted still
higher; and the two could speak of their brothers in friendly
reciprocation. The good Liana sought to bring to the help of her friend
many a thing which would hardly take hold, particularly mythology,
which, by reason of the French pronunciation of the names of the gods,
was still more unserviceable to her. Even with books Liana sought to
bring them together; so that reading was to her a sort of week-day
Divine service, which she attended with true devotion, and was always
delighted when it was over. Through all these water-wheels of knowledge
streamed Roquairol's love, and helped drive and draw. How many blushes
now flitted without any occasion over her whole face! The laugh which
once expressed her gayety, came now too often, and betokened only a
helpless heart, which longed to sigh.
So stood matters with her when Charles once playfully stole behind her
and covered her eyes with his hand, in order, under the mask of her
brother's voice, to give her soft, sisterly names. She confounded the
similar voices; she pressed the hand heartily, but her eye was hot and
moist. Then she discovered the mistake, and flew with the concealed
evening and morning redness of her countenance out of the room. Now he
looked closer into the eyes of Liana, who blamed him for it, and hers
too had wept. She would fain at first conceal from him the object of the
sisterly emotion; but another's No was to him, of old, an auxiliary
verb,--a fair wind blowing him into port. Liana grew more and more
agitated; at last she related how Rabette's account of Albano's youthful
history had drawn from her in turn the history of his early relations,
and that she had portrayed to her the bloody night of the masquerade,
and even shown his bloody dress. "And then," said Liana, "she wept with
me as heartily as if she had been thy sister. O, it is a dear heart!"
Charles saw the two linked together like two pastures, namely, by the
rainbow which stands over both with its drops; he drew her with thankful
love to his breast. "Art thou then happy?" asked Liana, in a tone
ominous of something sad.
She must needs disclose to him her full heart, and tell him all. He
heard with astonishment, how that whole Tartarus-night, on which the
unknown voice had promised Linda de Romeiro to his friend, had been made
known to her. By whom? She held an inexorable silence; he contented
himself, because, to be sure, it could only have been Augusti, who was
the only one that knew of it. "And now believest thou, thou heart from
heaven," said he, "that I and the brother of my soul could ever separate
by robbing each other? O, it is all otherwise, all otherwise! He curses
the mock-spirits and the object of the mimicry. O he loves me; and my
heart will rejoice in the day when it is his!" The touching ambiguity of
these last words dissolved him in a sacred melancholy.
But she, in the midst of the heartiest overflow of feeling, took part,
as if out of piety, with the spirits, and said: "Speak not thus of
spiritual apparitions! They exist, that I know,--only one needs not fear
them." Here, however, with firm hand she held fast the veil over her
experiences; he too had known long since, that, notwithstanding her most
tremblingly delicate feelings, which shrunk even from the sight of the
blue veins on the lily hand, as from a wound, she had appeared
unexpectedly courageous before the dead and in the ghostly hours of
fantasy.
Behind the waves of so different an emotion which now drove his heart up
and down, Rabette was eclipsed. He burned now only for the hour when he
could tell his Albano the singular treachery of the Lector.